Experimental, and controversial, debut feature
set in the context of the 1960s Naxalite student
movement in Calcutta. Resorting to a mix of
colour and monochrome scenes to convey the
persistence of the past in the present, the story
tells of a professor of economics, Bhishmadev
Sharma (Chattrejee), peripherally connected
with and clearly sympathetic to the student
movement, who is arrested, tortured and
imprisoned for ten years. He emerges into a
changed Calcutta, exemplified by the
existential traumas of his now rich former
student Samar Gupta, the writer Pragnya and
the young activist Udayan, the latter
unperturbably continuing to claim that the
present is a revolutionary situation. The film’s
political passion derives from its refusal to
forget a traumatic past, juxtaposing the
interaction of temporal dimensions with a
sophisticated mise en scene of spatial
discontinuities.